Quote Originally Posted by jamaicajeanne View Post
Reading MSN this morning and saw this.....

The mastermind of a $55 million computer hacking scheme that pillaged ATM machines all over the world pleaded guilty Tuesday in Brooklyn Federal Court.

Turkish national Ercan Findikoglu is merely a high school graduate, but he was able to attack and breach the computer networks of at least three payment processors for Visa and MasterCard credit and prepaid debit cards.

"I intended to defraud the financial institutions by manipulating the account balances," Findikoglu told Federal Judge Kiyo Matsumoto.

The cybercriminal was able to falsely inflate the balances on the accounts, then he forwarded the account information to "cash crews" standing by in 26 cities from July 2010 to February 2013. Findikoglu carried out the intrusion from his homeland, he told the judge.

When the crew members received the green light, they began making large withdrawals from ATM accounts in which the limits on balances had been lifted, according to court papers.

Thirteen co-conspirators had previously pleaded guilty.

Findikoglu faces up to 14 years in prison when he is sentenced on July 12. He is also on the hook to repay $55 million in restitution to the financial institutions that were ripped off, a $250,000 fine, and will be deported to Turkey after finishing his jail term.

Law enforcement officials said $2.8 million was stolen from cash machines in New York City, making it the biggest single cash theft since the Lufthansa heist carried out by a Mafia crew at Kennedy Airport in 1978.
This is why I stated that the only constant in this latest scam is the processing center in Brazil. Determining the origin of a hack is a very time consuming and difficult thing to do. Especially if the hacker is a talented programmer, as the teenager in the above story was better than the banking transaction processing centers security programmers. This latest scam has all the hallmarks of a new, multi-faceted hack which can be changed when needed. This makes it even harder to detect and eliminate. I am sure that the banks are working together as they did above to catch this latest scam.